Cotton harvesters having on-board module forming structure such as described in commonly assigned U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,650 provide a compact bale or module directly on the harvester to reduce the amount of support equipment needed in the field and minimize harvester idle time during offloading. The on-board processing structure includes a bale handling system for moving a formed bale rearwardly to prepare the bale chamber for a second bale with little or no harvester down time. An accumulator allows harvesting to continue during brief interruptions in the operation of the module forming structure or other crop processor. Problems with such an accumulators include regulating the cotton metered from the area to avoid excessive cotton flow that would clog the input to the processor while assuring a generally continuous flow for uniform processing. Too much variation in cotton flow affects the integrity of the formed bale. Flow must be uniform and the cotton should also be uniformly distributed across the width of the in-feed area to the chamber. Although the roller structure of the type described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,263,650 having counter-rotating rollers provides improved metering, uniform feeding without clumping and without wedging of cotton between adjacent rollers continues to be difficult to achieve.
In the cotton industry, a solution to the problems involved with vertical feeding of cotton uniformly without clumps at a specified mass flow rate has been elusive. Current cotton feeding devices used at gins or other fixed locations are not readily applicable to mobile cotton harvesters. One type of feeding structure utilizes two opposing batted rollers that pinch the cotton between them. The cotton is then fed onto a spiked roller to break up clumps. The density of the cotton above the batted rollers must be controlled carefully since an overly high density will cause cotton to bridge over rollers and not flow. Dense cotton often wedges between rollers. Large clumps of cotton result in inconsistent feeding.
Therefore, most current vertically oriented feeder systems are limited to use with low density cotton, require additional processes and equipment to control cotton density, and have high input power requirements. Any use of currently available feeder device on a mobile harvester are severely limited by space, configuration and power requirements on the harvester.